Chicago BlackhawksAmerican professional ice hockey team based in Chicago. The Blackhawks are part of the “Original Six,” the group of teams that made up the National Hockey League (NHL) from 1942 until the 1967 expansion. They have won three four Stanley Cup titles (1934, 1938, 1961, 2010).

The team was established in 1926 by Chicago-based businessman Frederic McLaughlin, who was awarded one of the first U.S. expansion franchises by the NHL and subsequently purchased the defunct Portland Rosebuds of the Western Hockey League to form the nucleus of his team. In 1929 the team moved into Chicago Stadium, which was then the largest indoor sporting venue in the world, and it would serve as the team’s home until 1994. Originally known as the Black Hawks (the spelling was changed to “Blackhawks” in 1986 to match the original NHL paperwork), the team had some early success, with Stanley Cup wins in the 1933–34 and 1937–38 seasons. The second championship was notable because the Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup after posting a regular-season record of 14–25, the worst record of any team to go on to win the title (that they were in the play-offs at all owed to the fact that six of the NHL’s eight franchises qualified for the postseason at the time).

The Black Hawks returned to the Stanley Cup finals in 1943–44 but were swept in four games by the Montreal Canadiens. They soon entered into the worst stretch of play in team history, finishing every season but two between 1946–47 and 1956–57 at the bottom of the NHL standings. The 1960s was a period of renaissance for Chicago as squads featuring future Hall of Famers Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Glen Hall, and Pierre Pilote advanced to three Stanley Cup finals and won the franchise’s third title with an underdog win over the Detroit Red Wings to cap off the 1960–61 season. In the 1969–70 season the “Hawks” acquired goaltender Tony Esposito, who would go on to set the franchise record with 418 wins and be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. That season also marked the beginning of 28 consecutive play-off berths for the franchise, the second longest streak of postseason play in NHL history. However, over the course of those 28 years, the team advanced to just three Stanley Cup finals, losing on each occasion.

Despite the team’s failure to capture the Stanley Cup, the streak featured a number of high points. Notably, Mikita, Hull, Esposito, and Keith Magnuson anchored a Black Hawk team that lost a dramatic seven-game Stanley Cup final to a dominant Canadiens team in 1970–71. The Black Hawks returned to the finals two years later, but again they were defeated by Montreal. Additionally, the team finished atop their division seven times in the 1970s. A franchise tradition began during the 1985 play-offs, when Chicago fans—after watching their team get soundly defeated in the first two games of the conference finals by the Edmonton Oilers—cheered loudly during the U.S. national anthem, drowning out the singer; since then, all home games at Chicago Stadium (and later the United Center) featured raucous cheering during the national anthem by the home crowd. Chicago added popular players Jeremy Roenick and Ed Belfour in 1988, who then guided the (now single-named) Blackhawks to the Presidents’ Trophy (as the team with the best regular-season record) in 1990–91 and to the Stanley Cup finals in 1991–92 where they lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins in four games.

The team struggled through most of the 2000s, as the Blackhawks’ ownership made poor personnel decisions and alienated a large swath of its heretofore loyal fan base. Many observers claimed that—given the team’s long history and the seeming economic advantages of playing in a large metropolis—the Blackhawks were one of the worst franchises in professional sports. But a turnover in team management and savvy personnel moves that infused the team’s roster with young talent resulted in the Blackhawks’ returning to the play-offs after a five-season drought in 2008–09, and the team advanced to the Stanley Cup finals the following season, where they defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in six games to end a 49-year championship drought.